Saturday, February 27, 2010

Does anyone know where I might be able to purchase copies of the Gloranthan Classics reprints of old RuneQuest materials? There doesn't appear to be a website that I can find for its publisher (Moon Design), but perhaps I'm just missing something obvious.

Any help on this score would be appreciated, since I'm rather keen to obtain copies before they're no longer available, assuming that's not already the case.

OK - I read "There doesn't appear to be a website that I can find for its publisher (Moon Design)..." as a separate problem, independent of your primary reason for posting, that also needed fixing. Pardon my confusion.

This shows that the Big Rubble/Pavis reprint is no longer available through Issaries, but Griffin MountainBorderlands & Beyond, and Cults Compendium are still available from Warehouse 23. [As well as The Complete Griselda and Wyrm's Footprints (and Greg's notes)]

Also keep an eye out for books from the “Runequest Renaissance” of the mid-1990s – specifically, River of Cradles, Sun County and Shadows on the Borderlands.

They incorporate a lot of original Runequest II information, so they share a fair amount of content with the Moon Design reprints, but they add additional background detail, new adventures and some excellent artwork. In my opinion three of the best fantasy roleplaying supplements ever produced. Nobleknight seems to have all three in stock at the moment.

the Sartar book Moon Design has released for Heroquest is also a beautiful book, by the way. It's written for HQ (which I've never played) but it really reads like the lost Runequest book you always wanted.

@andreas,tedopon: I think it was because the MDS reprints were originally designed for the people that had been brought into the "Runequest Cult" since the third edition was no longer published. Very small print run to a boutique audience => high price point.

The reason why this information is hard to find is also economic. They don't want to support old Runequest material  they have too much invested in the success of the second edition of Heroquest and cannot afford to have it fail. Which is why they can get quite enthusiastic in the defence of the game and the ideas behind it.

That being said, Sartar is a good product. And one of the reasons for why Mongoose launched Runequest II was to bring that product closer in line with the current Gloranthan thought (as primarily propagated by Heroquest, so it is readily adaptable. Which is a dubious benefit of a game system where the opponents have no stats (the difficulty being set instead by the requirements of the narrative).

[Disclaimer: I dislike Heroquest and the idea of narrative storytelling presented therein intensely. I still run my Gloranthan campaign occasionally, but I tend to do so using Ironclaw (which works very well).]

Well, it's not just the RQ reprints which are kind of "secret" to the marketplace.

Issaries stopped being the main publisher and Moon Design took over, but the www.glorantha.com and www.issaries.com sites were both dormant and no pointer to a Moon Design site. It's like they don't *want* to sell their stuff. Now when HQ2 came out the did remedy the situation, but still.

Well. I gave up on it, after some experience of the new gloranthan mailing lists.

James, the publisher is a net-acquaintance of mine. I have emailed him your post and inquired if he has any copies left in his stock: I rather suspect the answer will be "sadly no", but he might have still copies.

@Rick I can vouch for the quality of both hard and softcover editions of the RQ reprints that Rick has done. I, personally, went entirely with the hardcover editions because I think they are that much sturdier and more handsome. I can't really say that the they're 20 dollars more handsome and sturdier, but they certainly look fine on my shelf next to my hardcover redbook of RQ2 rules... 8)

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